Joan Thirsk - Obituary

Joan Thirsk was an influential historian whose time at Bletchley Park informed
her decoding of England's agricultural past

Joan Thirsk, who has died aged 91, was the leading agricultural historian of her generation and had a huge impact on her field in terms of methodology and research.

Her greatest achievement was to explore and define regional differences in agricultural practice through the careful analysis of documentary sources, in particular probate inventories which provide evidence for crops, animals and equipment. This allowed different farming systems and local social hierarchies to be identified.

She also edited and wrote much of the fourth volume of The Agrarian History of England and Wales series, devoted to the period 1500 to 1640 . In 1974 she was appointed general editor of the series, which she brought to a successful conclusion.

She ranged widely, publishing studies of the introduction of new crops such as woad, saffron, tobacco and liquorice in which she stressed the importance of the English gentry as receptors of new ideas and agents of change. Yet despite her eminence, agricultural history was not her first choice of subject.

Born Irene Joan Watkins on June 19 1922, she grew up in north London. From Camden School for Girls she went up to Westfield College, London, where she read German and French. She was in Switzerland when war was declared, and went on to serve in the ATS in the Intelligence Corps at Bletchley Park, where she was a subaltern. There her interests turned to history. Deciphering codes, as she later explained, was the best possible training for the reading and interpretation of historical documents.

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After the war she embarked on a doctorate under the great economic historian RH Tawney, a major influence on her work, on the sales of sequestered Royalist land in the south-east during the Interregnum. After a year at the London School of Economics as an assistant lecturer in Sociology, in 1951 she was appointed Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English Local History at the University of Leicester. There she became a founder member of the British Agricultural History Society and, in 1953, published her influential Fenland Farming in the Sixteenth Century and an important article on the Isle of Axholme .

In these works she outlined many of the methods, approaches and sources which were to have such influence on her profession. In her account, the Lincolnshire fenlands, pre-Vermuyden’s drainage schemes, were shown to have been “poor respecting money, but very happy respecting their mode of existence”. While traditional farming systems may not have been the most economically productive, she argued, they possessed considerable social rationale.

In 1957 she published English Peasant Farming: The Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times, about a county where she had been briefly evacuated during the war. Later she edited several volumes in the History of Lincolnshire series. The Lincolnshire study was followed by Suffolk Farming in the Nineteenth Century.

Joan Thirsk was a founding member of the journal Past and Present and it was there that she published, among other papers, her researches into The Common Fields (1964) and The Origins of the Common Fields (1966), a reassessment of the rationale of English medieval field systems, showing them to be far more complex and locally varied than previously recognised.

In 1965 she succeeded WH Hoskins as Reader in Economic History at Oxford. She was a Fellow of St Hilda’s College until 1983, when she took early retirement, unhappy with cuts to university research budgets.

Her most influential essays, published in 1984 as The Rural Economy of England, included studies of the family unit, inheritance, rural industry, regional specialisation, Tudor enclosures and the introduction and diffusion of new crops. She was also joint editor of Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (1972), a collection made originally for her special subject students.

In her introduction to The Rural Economy of England, Joan Thirsk observed that the study of the story of people and communities in local landscapes was one which appealed particularly to women. This perspective was also apparent in her Ford Lectures, published in 1978 as Economic Policy and Projects: The development of a consumer society in Early Modern England, and in articles such as The Fantastical Follies of Fashion (1973). In this she united her own interest in knitting with her rural studies, challenging the notion that knitting did not develop until the 16th century by pointing out that the chain mail of medieval armour was “in fact, a knitted garter stitch”.

She continued to write and research well into her retirement. In 1997 she published Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day, an account of agricultural innovation inspired by a 17th-century inventory which included, in addition to “brass cooking pots, cambric, gold and silver thread, hats, knives, lace, poldaves, ribbons, ruffs, soap and tape”, no fewer than five references to woad. One reviewer described it as “a firebrand of a book”.

Joan Thirsk combined scholarship with a love of domesticity, often treating her students and colleagues to bread and cakes she had baked herself, and sending hand-knitted garments for their newly-born offspring. One of her last projects was research into the history of food and diet.

Joan Thirsk was a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. She was appointed CBE in 1994.

Her standing was reflected in the publication of two festshrifts in her honour: English Rural Society (1990), edited by John Chartres and David Hey, and People, Landscape and Alternative Agriculture (2004), edited by RW Hoyle, her last research student at Oxford.

She married, in 1945, James Thirsk, whom she had met at Bletchley Park. They had a son and a daughter.